It was another gorgeous day here today, and I got a chance to spend a couple hours working on the car again. With the body on the car, I wanted to start getting the various lights wired up so I could finish up the mounting of the chassis wiring harness.

The headlights mount to the car in an assembly consisting of a plastic bucket, with some metal frames for holding the bulb with appropriate adjustment and alignment screws as well as a trim ring that goes over everything.

To start off, I had to drill out the hole the wiring usually runs though. The normal headlight bulbs have three wires going to them — low beams, high beams and ground. My HID lights have the high beam and ground wires, plus a bulky insulated wire that carries the kilivolt levels of power when the bulb first fires. The connector on the HID wires from the ballast are 3/4″ wide, so I had to widen the hole quite a bit. Unfortunately that will make it harder to seal, but I’m sure I’ll find an option.

The bulb mounts to a round bracket with three metal clips, and then the bracket mounts to the plastic bucket using two adjustment screws and a set screw. The bucket has a rubber gasket between it and the car. This allows the headlight to be adjusted once the bucket is mounted to the car.

Three wires come out the back of the bulb — the large HID cable, and the two wires for the high beam. The HID cable runs to the ballast bolted to the X-member in the front of the car, and the high beam wiring, along with the turn signal and parking light wires, get routed into a 5-pin WeatherPak connector that hooks into the chassis harness.

Once I realized one of the headlights wasn’t working because I had borrowed the fuse for the driver side ballast, I had the headlights on and working. The color is slightly different above because the driver’s side light had only been on for a few seconds and the HID bulb hadn’t come up to temperature yet.

I did mount the running lights/turn signal lights in the front of the car, but the last picture above is the only shot I had of them. I didn’t get the wiring connector put together. It was getting to be dinner time, and I’m just relaxing this evening.

One unfortunate discovery I made: I think the wheels don’t fit in the front and, unlike the rear, there just aren’t any reasonable adjustments I can make. I have ’96+ SN95 spindles in the front, and apparently this is an issue with wider wheels/tires and the ’96 and later spindles.

I don’t have many options for it, as far as I can tell: new tires (maybe), new wheels that are narrower (which would mean replacing the rears, too…), new spindles (which would entail redoing the front suspension, steering rack, ride height, alignment and likely bleeding the brakes — probably at least two weekend’s worth of work, plus buying new spindles.

I’m not happy — it means its basically going to be impossible to have the car done by the Factory Five open house. Getting it legal by the end of May depended on me continuing to make good progress every night, and substantial progress every weekend during May.

The last thing I did this evening, other than be depressed about this revelation about the wheels, is start looking at my fan controller. This is a circuit that uses a timer integrated circuit tied to a potentiometer and a power transitor to essentially control the speed of a DC motor using pulse-width modulation. This will basically allow me to control the speed of the heat/vent blower using a knob in the cockpit. I have to break out my finer soldering iron and assemble it at some point this week.

Tomorrow or Wednesday I hope to get the front lights wired into the harness and get the rear lights done, depending on how hot it is tomorrow. Thursday, in that case, I can hopefully deal with the Mini backup light, and then can pull the body back off this weekend and keep moving on finishing the chassis. With any luck someone will reply to my post on the Factory Five forum with a suggestion about the front wheels that won’t cost me weeks of time and a pile of money.